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For one of my Human Computer Interaction (HCI) classes, I was tasked with observing a user doing something that they hadn’t ever done before. I decided it would be a good chance for me to get my girlfriend playing some video games, so I decided to observe her (the novice user), playing the tutorial of Just Cause 2.

So, I sat her down on my bed, handed her the gamepad, and told her to play for 30 minutes. She wasn’t allowed to ask for any help, and had to attempt to complete the objectives given to her, no matter what. Now, I did not expect her to have a large amount of trouble with the game. I expected her reflexes to be slower, and I expected her to have some trouble aiming at enemies and just generally staying alive.

However, observing her made me realize just how terrible video games can be at conveying new information and game mechanics to the user. Rather than put the knowledge to complete the objectives in the game world, they expect it to already exist in the gamer’s head.

As follows is a number of comparative mockups of what the game did wrong, and how it could have fixed it.

TL;DR: Made my girlfriend play video games. Realized video games can be shit at teaching people.

What I hope is that other gamers looking at these images will agree with me that even modern, AAA games are poor at conveying information to novice users. The more I look into this, the more I realize that we're good at video games because we're good at inferring what to do, whereas a new player, who has absolutely minimal knowledge of the game, cannot infer what to do because of their lack of experience.

My girlfriend wanted to learn how to play Just Cause 2 because she thought it looked cool, she was genuinely interested in it. It wasn't the control scheme or the game's intricacies that stressed her out and frustrated her, it was the lack of feedback and the lack of intuitive design. Hopefully game developers start to realize that to design a game for the casual audience, you need to teach them how to play the game rather than dumb the game down to a pick up and play level.

Another TL;DR: Developers should stop making Casual Games and instead make Good Games with Good Tutorials

EDIT: I'm in class for the next three hours, but I'm still trying to have a thoughtful discussion with as many people as possible.

EDIT2: I'm saying this a lot, but please don't post yet again that trying to make this my girlfriend's starting game was a bad idea because Portal is easier to play. She was legitimately interested in this game, and if game developers cannot make games that are playable by their consumers, than they need to rethink marketing games as a whole. Video games can't become mass media if all but a handful are playable by most people.

EDIT3: Added the album link to the top, bottom, and middle of this post due to some people not finding it.

I work for a company that develops training software for the government, mostly the military. In recent years we have been moving towards almost exclusively serious games (before, it was just "software", not games) and this means things like avatars, gameplay instructions, etc. Most of the senior people at my company are retired military with no video game experience, and only a fraction of our actual software development team (that's me) is experienced with games (i.e. "what makes a good game"). OP's issues are very real to me, as (1) we aren't actually a "game studio" (so a lot of final decisions neglect proper game design philosophies) and (2) our end users are likely to not be big gamers (similar to OP's girlfriend).

It's incredible what sorts of habits and past game experiences we take for granted.

Unfortunately, thelastbaron would probably be extremely limited in what kinds of questions they could answer. They might also need to get a supervisor's permission, which would be difficult, to say the least.

Video games could be great training tools if it was easier to become good at them. The only difference between the average gamer and the average human is is the gamer has experience.

Complexity of games doesn't stop people from playing them, look at chess or poker. Its the fact that video games are poor at conveying information to new users. Good luck on your military simulator, and look into stopping by your local college and letting some Information Technology or HCI students tear it apart.

Not to be harsh, but why is the government going to you? Shouldn't they just hire a game development studio? Assuming that the military is stuck with you as a contractor, why don't you just hire some real game developers?

People in the military are familiar with video games. 80% of active duty Army personnel have played Call of Duty, that reaches 95% for new recruits. UAVs are actually piloted with an Xbox 360 controller.

It has more to do with the experience of our senior leadership and our training writers (most of whom are retired Army). Customers don't necessarily seek us out for our game development credentials, but for our credentials as simulation developers. Realism and accuracy take priority over everything else. The fact that we have made a shift towards producing games has mostly been an internal decision, not an effort to meet a requirement. At the end of the day, whatever goverment agency or co-contractor doing business with us really cares about is our product's ability to teach.

I would be surprised if anybody at a more traditional game studio has the subject matter expertise to provide a suitable product.

I can give you an example of one that I worked on. It's call "Back Quack". Apparently diagnosis and treatment of back pain is something doctors have a hard time with. This game lets doctors go through an exam with cartoon characters, trying to correctly diagnose and treat a patient. There's a handful of 'wacky' things thrown in to make it more fun and you're scored at the end. It's certainly a game but the primary purpose is to educate, not simply to entertain.

I found an old dos one one time where you would diagnose and treat progressively more complicated illnesses. It would start with a stomach ache, and you would prod them in certain locations, but then before long you'd be performing an appendectomy. After you would kill a patient, it would accuse you of being jack the ripper, and then take you back and show you the process again until you succeeded.

You could forget to put your patient under (or give them anethetics) before starting the operation and they'd let out a blood curdling scream. You had to do stuff like stop bleeders with clamps and soak up blood with a sponge during the operations. And of course you gotta be careful not to sew up the patient with any tools left inside.

Yeah that's the one. Also your patient would undergo certain heart arrhythmias during surgery and you had to inject the right stuff in to make it okay again based on what the heart monitor looked like. Yeah that was fun.

"Serious game" implies that the purpose is education first, entertainment second (if at all). The games that we make are actually very boring to be perfectly honest, though there is some effort to inject "fun" where possible. They merely present important instructional information (as supplements to real course material) in the framework of a video game. A student might take control of an avatar in a 3D environment and run through simulated exercises, such as correctly identifying and reporting an IED, or gathering fingerprints off of a suspected bad guy. Throughout the simulation, the student is quizzed on what they've learned so far via multiple choice questions or minigames. Each training exercise evaluates the student on their performance. My understanding is our products are used in classrooms or by soldiers in the field as study material.

From what I remember, VBS2 uses the same engine as the original ARMA, but obviously has a lot of modifications and addons for military training. The hardware is a big part there too, having quite elaborate setups.

Because it is awful. Let me try to memorize these key mappings in the 2 seconds it takes to load. Just Cause may have been one of the worst games to use for the experiment. Honestly there should have been more than one game.

Agreed. I'm a veteran gamer, I can pick up almost any game and intuitively know what every button does within about thirty seconds, and it took me like ten minutes to get the JC2 controls down solid. That's an unacceptable amount of time for me to learn the controls of a game, considering how fast I can pick up other games

Not a very good argument considering megaman is such a simple game compared to modern games. Also i bet he had played a dozen platformers similar to megaman before. I'm pretty sure everyone knows what to do in a 2d platforner considering Super Mario is so popular.

Try teaching a person who has never played a game to play for example Fallout 3. Even movement would be hard to them on top of the complexity of an RPG. It would take a while before you can even start to enjoy the game and guess what that takes? PRACTICE

EDIT: You know why movies are so accessible? They don't require practice or former knowledge. Some people either don't like games or just don't have the will to get in to them.

I know that the Uncharted franchise is kind of hit-and-miss in terms of popularity around these parts, but if there's one thing it has mastered, it's gradually implementing gameplay elements. It improves throughout the series as well, with Uncharted 3 not even making you fire a gun for what must be half an hour, and even then it's an inanimate object. The mechanics of melee and platforming are also introduced incrementally, and it lets you get used to one before giving you something new to try. However, it tries not to hold the hands of more experienced gamers; tutorials consist of a action slowing to a stop, a single line of text telling you the commands, and then it's gone forever. It's pretty much the perfect balance for a modern day game, where there's such a considerable learning curve. Newcomers can't just be expected to know what each analogue stick does, which is something a lot of people seem to forget.

I think many of the folks commenting here are under the impression that you're advocating basically dumbing down games so they're accessible. That's obviously not the case - you're just making a case for consistency and clarity in design. Don't use a red dialogue box for one important message, but then normal ones for all the following, equally important message. Avoid confusion on the screen early on. Work the tutorial into the form of the game, not just the text. None of those, if done properly, should make the tutorial a pain to play through for someone who is experienced with video games, since they'll just see it as another part of the game.

It's not like, as several have suggested, learning to read English and then expecting to be able to get through Finnegan's Wake. It's more like reading a typical novel and expecting the characters and the setting to be adequately explained in the first few pages. I can think of cases where such things aren't adequately explained - those are uniformly either bad books, or they're doing it for a reason (or both - you can have bad artsy books). If your game doesn't introduce its gameplay very well, it's either doing it for a reason (the uncertain nature of the controls is an artistic statement!) or it's a bad game, at least in that respect. Or both. You can have bad art games.

(remember folks, games are a unique art form, and their gameplay, their interactivity, is an essential element, just like the plot and characters are in a novel - introducing the gameplay should be just as important, and is just as good a place for creativity, as is introducing the setting of your novel)

I can't say I agree with the use of red dialogue boxes. Red usually denotes some kinda of danger. In this case it was that starting a new game would wipe your current save data. Using red for all the tutorial messages after that does the opposite of making them seem important. It makes the ones that are important now seem not so important.

To be completely fair, that seems to be exactly what you propose in many of the suggestions in the album.

Subtle cues for things like "I can grapple a dude when the icon is swirly, and can't when it is not" is exactly what games need more of, not less of. It is where your eye is going to be focused anyways, and you only need to experience it once or twice to make the connection.

Figuring things out with your own brain (no matter how minor that thing is) will also make it much, much more likely that you will remember that piece of information than if you had to stop playing to read any amount of text about it.

Couple that with the reasonably assumed notion that the majority of gamers abhor having to read any sort of tutorial. I would prefer to stumble in the dark for the first 30 minutes of gameplay, figuring it all out for myself, than to spend even 10 minutes having my hand held and being stuck reading instead of playing the game I sat down to spend my limited free time playing.

Nobody wants to be lectured as their first experience sitting down with a new game. Text-free contextual conveyance of information is the way to go.

And I don't mean to instigate or troll but it would, quite honestly, be very easy to assume that you simply tried as hard as you could to find faults in the game so that you could avoid giving your girlfriend the impression that you think she is bad at the game, rather than an honest effort to study improvements for the game. Just thought I'd point that out as explanation for the trolls you elude to, in case nobody else had (I didn't read any comments below this point).

Subtle cues for things like "I can grapple a dude when the icon is swirly, and can't when it is not" is exactly what games need more of, not less of.

The problem with the grapple is the initial state doesn't suggest that it won't work, and the icon being swirly doesn't really do a good job of suggesting it would. A far more obvious pair would be a target with a standard (/) cross, and a plain target.

It really doesn't matter why he was finding faults anyway; faults are faults. The goal at the end of the day, tutorial or not, is to create a sensible user experience that communicates effectively with the gamer. His comments merely pointed out cases where the currently attempted communication was failing, and suggested ways to improve it.

Your suggestion would not work because the crosshair is used for everything, not just grappling. It is a shooter. Having a line across the bullseye while targeting enemies close enough to shoot but too far to grapple would obviously inhibit gameplay. It had to be subtle and practical to function as a part of gameplay.

Hey btw, guess what happens when you try to grapple someone who is too far for the animation to even trigger. The grappling hook goes straight toward them, falls short when the cable runs out, and retracts. Do you really need a manual to understand that you're too far away? Crosshair animation or no, is there not only one conclusion to be drawn? Are we really even discussing the expectation that a game should have to explicitly convey every automatic observation?

I can't seem to find a link right now because searching anything Mario related brings up so many results, but I read an awesome article about UI once that involved the original SMB.

The long and short of it was that the game taught you what to do visually as it progressed. In the title screen they show Mario running to the right, setting up the whole scrolling aspect. Then they introduce jumping and running without printing a single word on the screen.

Long story short, the authors of the article demonstrated that almost every move/skill/trick in the original SMB was easily conveyed without words, and held it up as an example of intuitive design.

So, you're saying you should immediately be dumped into the most difficult parts? Every game teaches you. Super Mario Bros, often held up as not doing that... what does it start with? A demo that shows Mario moving through a level on his own, letting you see that you kill enemies by jumping on them. When you start, there's one, single goomba to worry about, letting you work out how to kill it without worrying about paratroopas and wind and poison mushrooms, some of which weren't even introduced until the second levelset (which explicitly billed itself as 'for super players', so that's not an issue)

That is teaching the player, not "click here to move to the next segment!"

Similarly, OP mentioned things like removing enemies around where you're introducing the flak gun, letting the player figure the flak gun element out without panicking and dealing with the pressure from the enemies.

For a more complex game: Portal. They're following exactly the same setup. They introduce the portal, under GLaDOS's control. Then the portal goes away, and they introduce the cube-button-door system. Then they put those together. Then, and ONLY then, they give you the ability to control one portal... and they check you still understand that stuff and introduce flinging. Then they give you the second portal control, and do it all again. Then, after all that, they introduce turrets, etc etc.

This is what I was trying to illustrate, games today are geared to experts. Its ridiculous to think that the tutorial for JC2 on hard is the same as it is on easy. I'm not proposing we dumb down games, I'm proposing we fix the way games convey information.

This is what I was trying to illustrate, games today are geared to experts.

Some games are geared to experts.

With that being said, JC2 had the absolute worst tutorial of any game I've played in the last 5 years. You definitely picked a good example for your coursework, but your attempt to draw broader conclusions about the industry from a sample size of one are methodologically suspect.

Fighting games are big offender lately in that they assume knowledge of the series. "Training modes" usually involve going through a list of combos for a character, meanwhile the game never bothers to teach you what should be done and when. 'Low attacks break high blocks' may seem obvious, but someone picking up the game or genre for the first time simply may not know that. Similarly with concepts like juggling or popups, or things like recovery times, or what have you.

Soul Calibur spends a bit of time teaching you about the Guard Impacts, but otherwise the genre is rather barren of instruction for someone trying to get into it.

Skullgirls, which came out last month, actually incorporates a pretty good tutorial to at least get you to the level where you can adequately play and make good use of training mode. That said it still is a very difficult genre to break into.

As a person with a Bachelor's of Science in Human-Computer Interaction, the point of the degree is to be able to teach anyone anything, in a relatively short amount of time, without the need for human instruction. Videogames, as of late, have seriously failed to give humans the benefit of the doubt in terms of innate intelligence. Hand holding is very detrimental in creating autonomous individuals.

I had this problem in Red Dead Redemption. I'm not a novice player, but the game put the directions in the top left corner in the middle of an action sequence, so I'd completely miss the direction while trying to direct my horse or not get shot. I never caught the directions on how to use the lasso, I ended up looking it up online because it frustrated the hell out of me.

I thought the same way, but you could definitely make the case that Half-Life had a better tutorial system. Today's games display a ton of information, but do so haphazardly without regard for the user.

I always liked Halo's tutorial. Even though it added 5-10 minutes to the beginning of the game. I always though the "emerge from stasis/whatever" section where they have someone walk you through "calibration" really added to the ambiance of starting a new game, not to mention is actually very useful to someone new.

One thing that really got me was how they dealt with standard/inverted look controls. The guy tells you to look up so you try to do that. If you tilted the control stick up, you would look up. If you tilted the control stick down (for those used to inverted controls), you would STILL look up.

Maybe you could get your girlfriend to try Halo's tutorial, and compare it to Just Cause 2 or a modern FPS? I'm genuinely curious about how a non-gamer would fare with that tutorial; I always thought it worked very well.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 had great 'tutorials' because they taught the user what to do intuitively with minimal fourth wall breakage. Additionally, the user was advancing the plot right away. A ton of thought and sweat went into making these things work. Plus, Valve never stops thinking about teaching the player, that's why they are the best. If you go through Ravenholm with the commentary on, it's amazing how much they train the player, and how totally invisible it is at the same time.

"Pick up that can!" was more than a great moment in video game story telling, it was also a great moment in game design.

For the record, the term is fourth wall breakage, not third. It comes from theater productions, in which there are three physical walls around the stage, and the invisible "fourth wall" between the actors and the audience.

They have a tendency to give you all the information at once. HEY YOU'VE GOT A GUN THIS IS HOW YOU SHOOT IT ZOOM IN WITH THIS BUTTON MOVE THE CAMERA LIKE THIS GRENADES ROLL CROUCH JUMP DOUBLE-JUMP JUMP HIGHER DEVIL TRIGGER okay, we're done, here's a room full of enemies with six exits. The bad guy will show up, taunt you, then leave through an inaccessible exit.

Half-Life did a pretty good job of pacing the first section. (Its sequel as well.) You spend like ten minutes without a weapon and you don't move on until it's done.

To be fair, I've been playing games for 25 years and I still couldn't figure out what to do in Just Cause 2.

It's a beautiful game and fun to screw around in, but I think it suffers from poor design (i.e. unclear objectives). Some people like its sandbox nature, but I like having a clear idea of what to do along with the option of screwing around if I choose to.

RA in HCI here. You've made some interesting points. The context of a video game probably wasn't the best choice for examining interaction with a computer because good game design principles are often the opposite of what we consider "good" in HCI. Games are inherently challenging and shouldn't always hold your hand. Interaction shouldn't always be simplified because part of the challenge and reward is mastering control and figuring things out on your own. Contrast this to what you're being told in class about simplifying interaction.

Games have a lot of ambiguity in them. There's a lot of visual (and audible, but that's a different discussion) information being presented to the user and contrary to some of your arguments, that can often be a good thing. Good games will empower the user and present choices in how they achieve their goals and representing ambiguity is a big part of that. For example, you point out that some interface elements and the overlay icons are distracting. What this information does, however, is guide the player by presenting enough information to draw their attention to something, but in a way which doesn't either detract from the difficulty or make them feel led in that direction. Eventually the player will learn that the gun icon on the screen can guide them towards finding new weapons or ammo and that this is a good thing, but at the same time they can choose to ignore this. This is an example of the tradeoff between guiding the user and managing information overload. In different contexts, sure, it would be better to present less (or more) information on screen; but how do you determine the correct contexts to do this in? If you remove distracting UI elements during a key puzzle or a boss fight, for example, you risk alienating the player whose strategy may involve interpreting information you consider distracting.

Just Cause 2 is a complex game, I completely agree there. As an experienced gamer (and a fan of the first JC) I was able to pick it up quite quickly. I think it's natural that new gamers are going to have some difficulty, but this can be due to a variety of reasons. It could be unfamiliarity with a controller, lack of intuition from other games, or a lack of understanding of some common game mechanics. The first one is a problem not just limited to video games. A suitable analogy is undeveloped motor skills in someone who is new to a sport. Goodness knows I had difficulty when I started mountain biking, but these skills develop over time. This is not so much a design problem as it is just lack of experience (although interaction design could be improved to bridge this gap...) A game like JC2 is going to rely a lot on gaming experience and there's only so much you can do to make it forgiving of new users as well as a challenge for the larger audience of "experienced" gamers.

You make good arguments and I believe a contending issue here is lack of general gaming skills, not just poor tutorials in games.

I agree with a lot of what you've just said. I'm not saying that my arguments need to be applied to every difficulty level or to the entire game. What I'm saying is that a tutorial on Easy mode should not make assumptions that people know what a flak cannon is, or to look for very subtle changes in their aiming recticule for cues on what to do. It's an interesting conundrum designing something to be playable for novice users, and it's a conundrum that the gaming industry has attempted to overcome by making everything simpler.

I told someone I was making my girlfriend play Portal 2 once, and she said, "All boyfriends have their girlfriend play Portal! It's weird!"

It's not really weird, it was a purposeful choice-- unlike JC2, the Portal series was designed to teach the player the mechanics of the game intuitively. This is obvious from the developer commentaries. So, after Minecraft, her first game was Portal 2, which she enjoyed.

So, this doesn't change that JC2 is a bad 'beginner game', but I don't think that it loses any merit simply because of that fact. Portal is a great 'beginner game', and I think it should be used as such, not JC2.

At first a found myself agreeing with you, but then I got to the last part, and I have to disagree.

I would say Portal (1 and 2) is superior to most other games in the way it presents itself. I would not consider it a "beginner game" in any way. The only reason it appears simple is because the player is eased into it. Sure, it's a bit shorter than many, but it's still difficult, but it paces itself. Throw someone into the deep end and they're gonna have trouble. I ran into this problem when I was trying to play-test a portal 2 map I made a year ago with someone who had only played the first portal.

The reason many experienced gamers recommend portal to our girlfriends or family members or whoever isn't because it's easy; It's because we know the game does an excellent job teaching the player how to think with this rather foreign mechanic. Other games would benefit from this technique as "simple" FPS controls are quite foreign to non-gamers. Coming from 3rd-person games like zelda, FPSs were always very confusing to me, and I still struggle with console FPSs simply because the controls suck when compared to the PC.

I agree with the OP. Every game should be able to stand on its own. Until developers realize this, gaming is going to have a hard time being accepted as an equal along side other forms of "more accessible" entertainment such as TV and movies.

This. So many gamers completely forget this. Navigating a 3D world for the first time in First Person is actually very difficult, which is why inexperienced player spend most of their energy focusing on getting that to work, rather than on all the other bits a game needs; like health, points, mini-map etc.

Portal is absolutely a good beginner game, because although it later gets difficult, everyone knows how to do logic puzzles on some level. What I would consider an 'advanced' video game would be something like PvP combat or the original Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, which have steep learning curves and are difficult to get into with no previous knowledge.

You'd be surprised; many people don't like the logic puzzles. Also, unless it's game marked at kids or a simulator (more on that in a sec), every game should be on the same playing field. What I mean by that is that a game's difficulty should not come from the controls, but from the missions and tasks presented to the player once he or she is comfortable with the controls. This was why there was a push for intuitive motion controls with the Wii and the competitors responses. Unfortunately, the technology isn't quite there and these games often result in more frustration if over-used.

In short, if what you're trying to make is a 'game,' the basics (ie, controls and basic concepts) need to appeal and be understandable by non-gamers and gamers alike.

The exception to this is in the case of a simulator (Talking about something like ArmA, the DCS series or, to a lesser extent, FSX. Several driving "games" could also be included in this category). Here, difficulty MUST come from both mission (level) design and basic controls, as the goal in a simulation is to be as realistic as possible, simplicity be damned. Save maybe the physical exertion and training, if it's hard in real life, it better be just as hard in the simulation; if you have to push 20 buttons to turn the thing on in real life, you better have to push 20 buttons in the sim. However, simulators and other "serious games" appeal to a very different crowd than typical gamers, and thus have their own unique requirements. That said, many of these sims (DCS for example) include fairly extensive tutorials that help out newcomers. Often these are better than those in typical AAA titles.

TL:DR: All games should include tutorials and should be accessible to everyone. Difficulty should come from level design, NOT control scheme. The exception to this are simulators, which attempt to accurately reflect the difficulty of controls and tasks, though they still often provide thorough tutorials.

Fair enough. I don't honestly take a strong-and-fast stance against the OP's point of view, I'm just trying to argue the other side of the issue. And I don't think games like DotA or Starcraft should really need to appeal to non-gamers in order to be considered good/well designed/polished.

In a perfect world, every game would be designed to teach the player how to play the game. It's ridiculous to think that Square Enix or EA would develop a game and put millions of dollars into its visuals, to come out with a product that only 50 million or so people can play. It's easy to evaluate a game and say "This has bad design or this is unintuitive", but its the companies that actively try to include those critiques into their games that really end up succeeding.

I let her play JC2, because she wanted to play JC2. She had seen me play it, and she had apparently seen a commercial some time, and wanted to experience blowing shit up.

I didn't find JC unintuitive at all, but this of course is largely due to my experience in games.

And, coming from that experience, the game did effectively teach me how to play it. Learning to use the grapple hook, vehicles, mounted weapons, and navigate the world and menus-- all seemed quite intuitive at the time. This of course is due to my trained eye which looks for popup hints and important setpieces regardless of color.

I do not think I want to be re-taught the basics of these sorts of things every game I play. Portal did it very well, especially Portal 2, because of the way it was seamlessly integrated into story and character interaction (see: the most memorable way to teach any player how to jump). Not every game is afforded this opportunity. I would love for some games to be more open as a medium but I also do not expect DotA to by My First GameTM , nor should it.

I can agree that the use of bright colors to draw attention to certain things is fine in the first level, but I don't want that distracting my attention all game. Lots of games constantly annoy you with 'tips' in case you somehow forgot them. Not to say constant help is always an issue-- Battlefield 3 has some really nice, low-profile control reminders.

A way to combat the "I'm experienced; I don't need a basics tutorial" feeling that many players (myself included) get is to used tiered tutorials. Many RTS games take this approach to what I would consider a great degree of success. Simply ask the player before the tutorial whether they have any experience with similar games and run a different tutorial based on their input.

I agree with OP that games can be difficult to learn as a beginner. If companies want to expand their market they need to address this issue.

I do not think I want to be re-taught the basics of these sorts of things every game I play.

A perfectly valid point, but the option should be there. New Vegas does a great job, where there is a dialogue option to say "I don't think I need this, I'll be fine" and skip the mission that is designed to teach you the basics of movement, combat, skills and item management.

In my opinion, most games that have huge budgets and that want huge returns should develop themselves to be played by everybody. It seems weird for someone that has not seen the first two Batman movies to be turned away at The Dark Knight Rises due to it not at least helping a new viewer from understanding it. It would be ludicrous to only sell a movie to people who are movie people, but that is exactly what the industry has done. Most of America doesn't know that if they want to play JC, they have to play portal.

I just don't think videogames are directly analogous to any other entertainment pasttime. They are more analogous to a sport. You can't just walk on the field and play football-- you won't know the rules, the skill set, or possibly the objective. Even beyond that, you won't have the coordination or possibly the strength to be effective. Sports require an introduction, some education, some training, and practice. Without a minimum of these things, they are just as unapproachable as many big videogames.

Also knowing how to play other sports easily translates into learning a new sport. There are often common rules and terms, many of the motions are similar, etc. Throwing a baseball or a football is different but a lot of the basic mechanic is there. If you bring in someone who hasn't thrown anything, you've got to start at a more basic level.

I sort of meant that each 'genre' of games (FPS, MOBA, RTS, Platformer, etc) is analogous to a sport of its own. First stepping on the field is playing an 'introductory' game like Portal which helps you understand the basic concepts of the genre. Or, more commonly, finding a friend who knows how to play and learning from them (really the only way to learn a MOBA at this point AFAIK). You don't start a sport with the advanced rules and plays, likewise you don't jump into videogames with more advanced 'core' games (I don't know if anyone still uses 'core', it seems so pretentious).

I've had a lot of experience with a wide variety of games, but even I thought Just Cause 2's tutorial was kind of confusing. I did get through it, and was able to play through and enjoy the rest of the main game, but I felt it could have been designed better, so that certain parts of it weren't so vague and unclear. I showed my friend Just Cause 2 much later on, and she got frustrated during the tutorial mission and gave up. I don't blame her; it doesn't do a great job of introducing new players to its gameplay. Later on she did play and love Portal, of course, hehe

I can see your point, but I think the biggest thing is that video games are not directly attributable to any other media. Video games can offer a different experience to different people. Some people like being in that minority who can play Dwarf Fortress (one of my favorite games) or ARMA, but in reality if those games better conveyed the information on how to play the game, you wouldn't have to worry about toning down the level of skill or knowledge.

The problem wasn't that my girlfriend couldn't kill the helicopter with the flak cannon, the problem was that she didn't know what a flak cannon was, and it is very easy to convey that to someone. People can accept not being good at something, but people can't accept not knowing how to do something.

The easy way around all this argument is a compromise. They could have put in multiple tutorials. Some basic training type stuff that teaches you how to move/shoot/what all the on screen indicators mean/etc. Then after that the normal tutorial. Allow the player to skip one or both tutorials. I've never played either Just Cause game but I've played enough shooters that I could probably jump into the first level of the campaign and figure everything out based on convention and the fact that the early levels are easier and more forgiving. Less experienced players need the tutorial that's already there. People with no real gaming background need even more hand holding before the current tutorial.

It's really not about having a tutorial. There are better ways to show that a flak cannon is an object that can destroy a helicopter - for example, the game could show someone being in the flak cannon, and then shooting at the helicopter, but getting killed before they successfully destroy it. Then, over the radio the woman could tell the user to take over for the now killed flak cannon operator. Now that the user has seen that the flak cannon is in fact a giant-ass gun that can destroy helicopters, they will be more likely to understand that they need to get in and control it themselves. In the game, the objective is "destroy the helicopter" and the only explanation of the flak cannon is it's picture, which means it's not immediately clear what you need to do.

But at the same time you can't expect every single game to put in a comprehensive tutorial for people who have never played a game before. Remember back when RTSs required you to go through a tutorial moving the camera around and zooming in and out etc, and how freak'n annoying that was. These companies probably just don't see why they should spend the extra time and money when 99% of their users don't need it.

For some games it would be like being taught to swim by being thrown in the deep end.

Now obviously I'm sure there are some improvements that can be made, but at some point the developers need to have a trade-off between how much to put in a tutorial and how much they can safely assume the majority of their player-base already knows.

Exactly. Portal progresses in complexity very nicely. Therefore, play beginner friendly games first before playing other games. Otherwise it's like saying that the reader level of Lord of the Rings should be the same as the reading level of a children's book.

Except both the children's book and LotR take the time to introduce their characters and settings. Do you think that all the fantasy books that rip off LotR in one way or another should not, for example, define what "elves" are and just assume the reader knows what they are because they're an experienced fantasy-reader?

A good book will properly introduce its elements - not in a hand-holding, here's-a-list-of-all-the-things manner, but in a way that is integrated into the body of the work - depending on the structure of the book, maybe in a way that the reader doesn't even notice that it's happened. We should hold video games (which have gameplay as a defining major element, as opposed to characters and plot for fiction) to the same standard.

I think in this scheme, Dwarf Fortress is, like, Ulysses or something.

What if I have no interest in portal, but I have an interest in different games? It's true that you can't jump into complex books without being comfortable reading, but that would only be analogous if every game had the same controls and the only difference was difficulty (in terms of gameplay). Playing a game should move from easy to hard, in order to get people into it. People are saying portal. Portal does it well, but that doesn't mean that portal will interest everyone, or that other games shouldn't do it well.

Exactly right. Portal, as brilliant as it is, won't satisfy everyone. Tutorials need to be weaved into the story if it's a single player game or game with a campaign. If it's purely online, tutorials need to be available. I will point to another Valve title, TF2, for doing the latter quite nicely.

This was actually the main thrust of one of the better GDC talks I went to this year. (The design keynote - was by the designer of Plants vs. Zombies, and it was about "how he got his own mom to play through his game." It basically boiled down to "make your tutorial actually GOOD. Spend time on it. Don't try to hack it out in an evening with blocks of text, but spend as much time as you need to make it teach, while still being fun and interactive.")

I can't find the talk online, but he wrote up this article which covered most of the same points.

if game developers cannot make games that are playable by their consumers, than they need to rethink marketing games as a whole. Video games can't become mass media if all but a handful are playable by most people.

Not all games are made for all people. There is serious discussion on which audience to appeal to for most games made. JC2 decided to appeal to the core game audience. You chose a game that is designed the be played by the experienced gamer as an introduction to gaming. This was a poor call on your part.

Good thing you did not choose a game like Dark Souls!

Saying something silly like developers should not make casual games is just that, silly. People enjoy casual games that they can play casually. I might want to play a bejeweled blitz game in the 5 min I have. I sure as hell do not want to load up a game of DOTA though! Tutorials will teach you how to use the controls, but not all games are simple enough to teach you how to play the game.

Sounds like plenty of people have suggested portal, and for good reason. Novice users should stick with games made for novice users. If I decide to play piano, and I am good at chopsticks, should I be mad at sheet music because I cant play Beethoven? Or should I have worked up, playing songs that are easy for introduction?

Not all games are made for all people. There is serious discussion on which audience to appeal to for most games made. JC2 decided to appeal to the core game audience. You chose a game that is designed the be played by the experienced gamer as an introduction to gaming. This was a poor call on your part.

I feel like this is sort of a false dichotomy.

There are a lot of people who MIGHT like Dark Souls, if it were better at teaching people to play it who have no experience with that sort of thing. It's not like it has to be only for "hardcore" or "casual" gamers or something. Bottom line, people will pick it up if it looks fun or like something they might enjoy. At that point, the ball is in the game's court. If they can teach the user everything they need to enjoy it, then great! Satisfied customer get!

The thing is, "tutorial" doesn't have to (and really shouldn't) just mean "bunch of text you have to click through, describing how to play the game". A tutorial is REALLY good if the user doesn't even realize it is there, and instead thinks they are just playing regular levels, and just happen to be figuring out all the things they need to know to play the game.

It's not a false dichotomy, some games are designed to skip a lot of the basics because it specifically appeals to hardcore gamers. There are a lot of learned abilities that you, as a gamer, have acquired over the years that extends beyond button pressing (despite what the naysayers may say to you). Control patterns, puzzle solving patterns, key variables, knowing "what is important" in a given situation - these are all concepts that you understand without needing to be told. Someone completely new at gaming may not be able to contextualize all these things (especially if there are multiple new contexts being given - such as a warfare setting videogame where the user has little experience with either warfare or video games).

What happened here is exactly what gwarsh described - you gave beethoven to a beginner at piano.

Are there problems with beethoven that make it inaccessible to beginners at piano? Yes. Would you suggest making it easier to play because piano beginners deserve to be able to pick up and play any piece of music they desire? I would say no.

It's a false dichotomy because neither of those things are mutually exclusive. You can still have a game that is hard and is designed for experienced gamers, while still making it approachable to people who are not hard core.

I actually think the Beethoven analogy is a bad one here, since it's not a matter of giving hard games to people vs. easy games. (There are plenty of easy games that are still hard to learn. There are plenty of hard games that do an excellent job of teaching the user to play them, if they don't already know.)

I think a better analogy would be asking someone to play Beethoven using hand-written sheet music that has been photocopied 30 times and is nearly illegible, vs. giving them a nice printed score. It's the same game/piece either way. And maybe it's too hard for them and maybe it's not. And maybe you have played enough poorly photocopied scores (and enough Beethoven) that you can use the old, illegible music! And if so, good for you! But it makes no sense making it harder for everyone else than it needs to be.

Games can be easy to understand and approachable while still being as crushingly difficult as you like. The point is that they need to be better at teaching users how to play them, in a way that lets new people understand the game, while not getting in the way of experienced people. It's a hard problem! But it's also an incredibly important one! And a lot of what makes some games popular over others really just boils down to "how easy is this to understand if you haven't played 5 other similar games already?"

Super Mario Bros. didn't need a tutorial because your controller had a 4-way direction pad, Start and Select buttons (which literally either started your game or selected between the options) and buttons A and B, and also only 2 directions to move in (either left or right, and you could go left very far). Even having absolutely no clue how to play, your options were so limited you would figure it out in short enough time so as not to get frustrated and quit playing. Even the various combinations of the buttons were limited (left+A, right+A, etc) and could all be run through in short order.

Nowadays, the controller has 8-way d-pad, 4 "main" buttons, 4 "secondary" (trigger) buttons, 2 analog sticks for more direction control, 2 buttons via the analog sticks, and the Start and Select buttons. Figuring out which button does what can take far longer if you have no idea what to do (whereas a seasoned gamer already has the foreknowledge of at least some of the buttons and controls, like left stick for strafe, right stick for look, right-trigger will usually shoot, etc). And if there's any combination of buttons that may do something, a novice will be there all day.

Articles that pop up every so often complaining about tutorials in modern games always seem to gloss over this fact. I've been gaming since aforementioned Mario, and even I find some of these tutorial levels useful. But like OP said, these tutorials are made for the seasoned gamer, and definitely not someone who's picking up the controller for the first time.

Exactly. I'm also not saying that we need to give seasoned gamers deeper tutorials, but it makes no sense for JC2 on Easy mode to have the same tutorials as JC2 on hard mode. There's a lot of information already being conveyed on screen that's being conveyed in a terrible manner.

i always wondered why there is just 1 type of tutorial in almost all games. the wide range of players, going from "first video game ever" over to "just replaying the game" is so huge that it cannot educate the first one enough without annoying the later.

the fact that the beginning of the game serves as the tutorial aswell does not help either but i can understand why game devs want the player to be able to get into it right from the beginning. the majority of people simply does not like to educate themselves before they can have fun

Fallout had a stellar example of how to intuitively prompt the player to explore the mechanics provided to them. Provide a (relatively) safe environment for players to try out a new mechanic, then present them with a challenge that requires them to implement this mechanic in a win-lose scenario. Hell, look at the start of Super Mario Bros. You are safe. You can try the d-pad and discover movement, press the buttons and discover jumping. Head forward a few paces. Uh-oh, a Goomba. What should I do? What if I apply the movement and jumping mechanics that I discovered moments earlier? Bam, dead Goomba. 1-1 is one of the best tutorials ever and there's not even any text prompts or messages.

It's funny that you mention that because I thought while FO2 was a better game overall, its opening segment was TERRIBLE. Not only did it not expose you to ranged combat immediately, but it also threw you into tedious combat with almost no reward and very little instruction.

There are so many people I know who gave up immediately, and I always tell them to tough it out past the first hour or so of gameplay because it's not until after that that the game really takes off.

"Hopefully game developers start to realize that to design a game for the casual audience, you need to teach them how to play the game rather than dumb the game down to a pick up and play level."
One of the smartest things I have ever read. Well said.

Yeah, I remember as a wee lad, learning to play a first person shooter for the first time. I practiced walking around in CS for hours, until I could manage navigating without hitting any walls. I think a lot of us have gamed for a while, so we take for granted a variety of control schemes/tropes.

If you ever want to know what it's like for a non-game (Mom, Grandma, girlfriend or whatever the stereotype is) to play a game go into the controls menu and switch the controller to "lefty". No, not "invert y". Not all games have this but lefty configurations switch which control stick is camera and which is movement.

Now try to play.

This is what it's like for people who don't play games to play a 3D game (first or third person). Yes, you can do it. But things like movement of the character or camera require a level of concentration that makes things very difficult. Then imagine you also don't have the position of the A,B,X,Y (or PS equivalents) memorized.

The point is not 100% accurate recreation, the point is to humble you as to how someone can be bad at something they aren't used to.

One thing we forget as gamers is how much games have in common with each other and how much we've already learned about games and controls in our lives. I agree that you are fighting muscle memory but as a gamer you also have better hand eye coordination than any non-gamer and a deeper knowledge of what you should be doing.

Switching to lefty, even with the muscle memory, most gamers will still do better than most non gamers.

if game developers cannot make games that are playable by their consumers, than they need to rethink marketing games as a whole

True, games should be accessible. Question is, do they have to be accessible to the complete novice? Novels are only accessible to experienced readers, most movies do not explain common mechanics such as time compression. The rules of sports aren't explained to the audience and TV viewers at the start of every match.

It appears to me every form of media/entertainment we have requires a basic knowledge to enjoy. Perhaps JC2 could've used a better tutorial, but to expect every game to be suitable for someone who's never gamed before is unreasonable.

Video games can't become mass media if all but a handful are playable by most people.

Look up some statistics on gaming in relevant age groups and you will see gaming already is a mass medium.

I don't think that is what this person is arguing. I think they are saying that the way the tutorials are set up do not work very well as far as introducing the player to new game mechanics, not that they don't teach the player how to look around properly.

Take Portal and Portal 2 as an example. 99% of the players, when they started the game, had never played a game with a portal mechanic. Instead of having large blocks of text explaining everything in detail to the player, they used colors, the environment, and basic instructions over several puzzles to teach the mechanics to the player, and highly encouraged experimentation. This is the way a game should teach players, and it's something that a lot of games get wrong.

I see this was commented on elsewhere in the thread, but I have to say... I was sort of impressed with some of the things said in the commentary during the original Portal game, about how some of the puzzles simply existed to explain concepts (ones that seemed obvious to me, but apparently not to all their testers) and the gradual introduction of new mechanics in order to aide in learning. That's a game that does it WELL. As opposed to many others, which are rather unclear.

I remember watching a video about how Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 were designed to teach the player how to play without any need for text or explanations. It was all about highlighting important objects (flashing yellow question blocks) and giving slight ques as to what to do. For example, the straightaway in the first level of SMB3 right after you get the power leaf where there are two goombas followed by a flying goomba encouraged you to run and then jump where at the end where there was a pit in the ground so that you would learn that by running and jumping, you could fly. The flying goomba implies the flying part and the straightaway encouraged running. Basically, there should be no excess distractions at the beginning of a game. JC2 completely fails on the "no distractions" front.

It's a tough spot for game developers since the experienced gamer wants something built on their existing skills while the casual wants a gateway into introductory level skills. Some games do a decent job of catering to both, but most go to either pole. If it's too simple or the tutorial is too long, then hardcore gamers hate it. If it's too difficult, you can kiss the casual market goodbye. Everyone has to start in gaming somewhere.

Developers also need to make the user choose their experience level right after the intro video or maybe even after the developers and publishers logos (including a way to choose subtitles on/off, yes I am looking at you GTA and uncharted games..).

If you choose novice/never played this genre before, then the tutorial will be very thoroughly, but if you choose I know the genre, there won't be as much to learn for the user, and then finally "I've played this game before", which essentially will leave you without ANY form of tutorial.

I just started playing video games about a year ago as a way for my boyfriend and I to spend time together. I kept getting frustrated with the games expecting me to intuitively know certain concepts/game mechanics and my boyfriend didn't understand why this was hard at first. Duh it was easy for him because he grew up playing these games and the concepts/mechanics are ingrained in his brain. Video game companies simply assume that most people have been playing video games since the early console years and have this knowledge. What's worse is when they think that they need to produce simple/dumb-downed games for new users that are boring and too easy. I am proud to say that I battled through the difficulty in the beginning and now consider myself a gamer :D

Your comment "Video games can't become mass media if all but a handful are playable by most people" really irks me. I agree with the fundamental sentiment. I think most of us can. However, I find it ridiculous that you think this applies to the present condition of game development.

Video games are already a mass media, and they will only continue to become more pervasive. The rise of mobile gaming, for example, is based primarily on developing games for new or broader audiences. Can you take apart Angry Birds' design and point out all the things that make it confusing and difficult to learn? I'd accuse you of nit-picking, if you could, for I've seen 4 year-olds and grandparents play that game. Same with Cut the Rope, and a long list of other wildly successful mobile games that are enjoyed, worldwide, by casual gamers and core gamers alike.

Video games are already everywhere, so clearly someone is doing something right.

I don't know if this was your intent, but I also don't like how you seem to be arguing that because Just Cause 2 does a poor job of teaching casual players how to play, then the video game industry as a whole has failed at instructional, intuitive design. I think this is flawed logic. If you handed a high school-level biology text book to a kindergartner, and that kindergartner failed to learn how the respiratory system works within 30 minutes, would you then claim that all educational book publishers are failing at their jobs?

Finally, I don't understand the statement, "Developers should stop making casual games and instead make good games with good tutorials". I think that tutorials in current games are, overall, significantly better than they were in the 90's and early 2000's. And why should developers stop making casual games? Casual gaming is a multi-billion dollar a year industry that reaches players around the world of all ages and playstyles, so what is it that casual game developers are doing wrong?

Player Research (us!) provide play testing and user research for the games industry - It is our job to think about the things that you've talked about here in order to make a better game. We examine the player experience in all types of games, sometimes with a particular focus on tutorials, in order to improve them during development.

I have a HCI background, as do many of the people in my profession. If you're interested in Games User Research, feel free to drop me a PM and I'll try and steer you in the right direction.

This is something I've actually thought a bit about. I wasn't able to play many games for several years, and when I got back into it everything had changed... drastically. I went from SNES, and early 90's pc games, to what we have today.

I went to school for design, and I see design errors all over the place in game tutorials. UI design, graphic design, web design... they all teach you how to get the information out there clearly, and make the interface as intuitive as possible. For some reason this seems to be missing in game design, and I think some of your images illustrate this pretty well. Some games are just not effectively communicating (at least not at the tutorial stage).

I don't know if this is something they're overlooking in school (I doubt it), or if it's something developers just don't pay as much attention to. Either way it's probably worth it for them to focus on it a bit more.

Now, all that being said, I did eventually learn how to do all this. It took a little time and some patience but I got it... anyone can. Once you learn the mechanics of a few games you can figure them all out.

first mistake: making someone do objectives in JC2, I would just let someone mess around first since a lot of the fun in the game is just messing around. I totally agree with your points though, they need to keep novice gamers in mind when designing the controls and tutorials.

You bring up a fantastic point. Newer games have completely failed at teaching you how to play them. Older games would always have fantastic, detailed (even usually too detailed) tutorials that made the game mechanics and controls very clear. Those are few and far between these days.

One great example is Empire: Total War. I was/am a giant fan of Rome: Total War and have been playing that for ages. When the Total War pack went on sale, I bought that so I could explore the other Total War games. I loaded up Empire, and even though it was similar to Rome it also had a lot more features and complexities. Now, if you've ever played a Total War game you'll know they're pretty complex. However, Empire: TW has ONLY A BATTLE TUTORIAL. That's only a fraction of the gameplay. The majority of the game takes place on the world map. There is absolutely no tutorial for the game map. There are hints that pop up once you've already started to do something, but nothing to tell you what to do in the first place. I was already pretty familiar with the Total War games and I was pretty confused what all I should be doing. I tried and failed to get into the game about 5 separate times until I decided to watch a 5-10 minute tutorial on YouTube. After that, I was totally fine. That was really all it took. It would not be difficult to implement a simple tutorial into games.

I thank you for writing this up. This really made some discussion going on and thinking in peoples head's (well for me at least). This also gave me a good idea for a project I could do for the video game community. Thank you.

Developers should stop making Casual Games and instead make Good Games with Good Tutorials

This is already a quickly growing trend in the games industry. Most games that come out nowadays have far more extensive tutorials than any game that came out even a few years ago. The most amounts of hand-holding in tutorials (as you might expect) come from games in the casual market, however even most AAA games coming out now do a very similar job.

Usability testing for games themselves (and not only just the tutorial) is a growing field and developers are realizing how important good accessibility is to hooking new customers. Give the industry a few more years and your girlfriend will be playing in no time.

The first time I ever played Just Cause 2 my game was glitched. Every time I opened the parachute I wasn't losing momentum. Every time I touched down on the mountain I died. It wasn't until I turned it off and came back to it later did I realize something weird happened. Rarely had a bug in the game after that.

I had trouble myself with the demo on PC. It flashed the tooltip on how to use the hook too quickly, and I never got the hang of it.

Somehow that game seems really boring unless youre riding on top of a passenger jet and crashing it into a building (hopefully full of tnt). Perhaps your girlfriend just had trouble becoming engaged with the game, didn't really know what to do to have fun. I act that way when I play GTA4 at a friend's house, my gameplay style is completely different from my friends (and hilariously so) since I don't own the game.

I think having an optional tutorial level/mission available to choose from the main menu would immediately relieve the issues for both sets of players (those that want fewer tutorials, and those who want to learn how to play a game)

Here is a relevant article from Gamasutra by David Grossman, veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer, and the designer and writer for the recent remake of Sam and Max.

Basically he let his Mother-In-Law, with complete zero gaming experience, play the first episode of Sam and Max without any help. And he basically made the same observation you did. Even when he thought he had completely dumbed down the beginning tutorial for newbies, it was still hard and frustrating for people new to the hobby.

He then took all the notes and redesign the beginning tutorial for the second episode and release of Sam and Max. It just shows how many things about gaming have already programmed into us through all the years of gaming and it all became muscle reflexes like playing an instrument.

OP I think the article would proof very informal for you and hopefully help you with your class :)

EDIT: TL;DR: A veteran game designer did the same thing you did, and ask for. Remade second game so even new gamers can understand it.

I suck at games, but every now and then I pick one up, to try and get the joy I used to out of em. I picked up Just Cause 2 today, after failing to be entertained by renting Dead Island last week. The controls on this game are horrible to learn, switch every few seconds, and I gave up after frustration when I was killed three times riding the top of a car trying to escape some military whatever.

Feels like a waste of $30, maybe I'll put some more time in to it tomorrow though.

To be honest, the amount of people put off by a 20 minute "Shift the stick to the left to move left... Good! Now shift it forward to run forward... Good!" overrides the few people (non-gamers, generally) that don't understand it.

Using a details button to explain it further is fine, otherwise with your suggestions you'd have a book of information on-screen before you've played for five minutes. Most of these things are very simple to understand if you played around for a few minutes such as the different cursor if you can grapple or cannot graple. If someone can't work that out with a few seconds of experimentation with controls, I'm sorry, but I don't want that audience being focused on when I'm trying to play a game. You say that distracting enemies pulls the player off the "Right path" but the objective is marked anyway. Your suggestions would turn it into a rail shooter and if people can't deal with that to begin with then there's not much hope for them playing the first mission.

But, you don't need a 20 minute "Shift the Stick to the left" style tutorial to convey information properly! Most of my mockups showed how the information was improperly conveyed, or hidden, or otherwise distracted by other things.

Also, just because a certain difficulty level of the game can have tutorials doesn't mean the others need them. Just Cause 2 on the highest difficulty level has all the saem tutorials as Just Cause 2 on the lowest, which is completely messed up.

I always use the original Halo as the perfect example for how to do this. In the first 30 seconds of the game you learn:

How to look around

How to interact with objects

How to move

How shields work

All of this is done quickly and concisely while still providing a reason for it to occur in the game (waking from cold sleep and testing systems).

Over the next five minutes while navigating towards the first objective the game teaches you how to jump, crouch and melee, all in non-life or death situations. It also shows you what the enemy looks like without putting you in the line of fire. It teaches you how waypoints work, and how to use your flashlight, all via simple non-interactive prompts on the screen.

When the player first gets a weapon they are put alone into a room with three very weak enemies who are as surprised to see him as you are to see them. When you first get grenades you are behind a barricade that protects you from gun fire, but allows for grenade tossing.

All of this is done without making the player FEEL like they are in the middle of a tutorial, it's just part of the level flow, and if you already know the controls then the guides are easily avoided.

What you're forgetting is that there are more creative ways to create the learning experience. You don't have to use text to give information. Early on in the game, linearity is a good thing - you can open it up later.

This is a great discussion topic. I only started playing video games a few years ago at age 19 or so. I don't really have the same intuitive sense of how things are supposed to be controlled in games. That doesn't make me a bad gamer, but it does make games more difficult for me.

Now, in some games, I can work around it. For instance, in WoW, I have what most people would consider to be a very weird control scheme, but I've excelled with it. I can tank or heal your raid no problem, but I'm not using WASD to move! In fact, I've rebound those keys to actions and use the extra mouse buttons on my gaming mouse to move.

But in many games I've played, the control schemes are poor and/or never explained well. I find this to be true ESPECIALLY in indie games. Most indie devs are like you, steeped in the way of video games since childhood. If someone like me tries to play a game that they design, it just doesn't work out too well, because they assume the player has knowledge that I do not. And that also happens in AAA games, though admittedly I haven't played many of those. In Oblivion the spell system was awful.

Long story short, don't assume the player knows anything, but don't beat them over the head with it either! It's a delicate balance.

It is a delicate balance, but it's one that they so often forget about. I'm sorry you've had trouble playing some video games, I can't imagine what that feels like and that's really why I did this study. To figure out why non-gamers can't play video games.

I'm slowly getting better but it took me a long time to finally map WASD to movement in my brain.

It's probably somewhat analogous to suddenly having to drive manual when you've only ever driven automatic and don't know a lot about how cars work. And then everyone who's driven manual forever being like "it's easy, duh, what's your problem!"

I'm... I'm not trying to say you're wrong here, because you're not. Rather, the choice of game is wrong.

If someone saw Return of the King, the Movie, and said that looks interesting and wanted to watch it, would you sit them down and let them go without explaining anything at all to them? The entire time they'll be wondering why they keep following the two guys and the imp-thing around when there's a Wizard, Dwarf, Elf and slightly less interesting but he's human so he must be important Guy around. They'll wonder who that is, what's going on, what happened to that guy's head, and so on.

So.. you sat someone down to a game sequel and then wondered why they didn't comprehend what was going on. That may have quite a bit to do with the problem right there. This.. is, of course, before we get in to how you sat someone down without much of a gaming history and handed them a controller and turned them loose.

Now.. no, games don't need to have included-in-the-story tutorials. The only thing more infuriating than a mandatory tutorial is a mandatory tutorial that locks out your abilities for no reason at all except that the tutorial hasn't properly taught you that pressing jump twice does a double jump or whatever.

No.. Games need a Tutorial Section where you can go to learn the game. The game itself should just get on with being a game and not try to teach you to play the thing.

I would think this is more analogous to watching the LotR trilogy without watching The Hobbit first (not entirely, but closer). Or perhaps without reading the book series first. It's not required, you might enjoy it more though.

I never played the first Just Cause but as far as story goes it seemed clear and there didn't seem to be any references to the first game that were required to know.

It's more like, perhaps, trying to write instructions for a child to do something we've been doing our entire life, like ride a bike, with no feedback on how we're doing. Without their perspective we may skip crucial instructions since they seem obvious to us.

This. I find it annoying when my gamer friends cringe as their parents struggle to get a headshot in Counter-Strike or walk AND use the camera. It's not exactly intuitive, and most modern games forget that not every consumer that wants to play as a super soldier knows how to play a video game.

Just Cause 1 and 2 are basically completely disconnected games. That is a terrible analogy. It is just the same as if someone started with Skyrim but couldn't pick up on things, so you said they should have started with Arena. Just because a game is a sequel does not mean they have any real connections outside of a few easter eggs and being the same ip. Even if a game is a direct sequel, you should give enough user feedback that they can pick up controls and know what is going on.

I'm not even saying that games need to have infuriating tutorials and limit player's actions throughout the game.

However, what I am saying is that this is a game that was marketed for the mass market. They wanted gamers to buy it, and they wanted non-gamers to buy it. This game has a much better tutorial system than its predecessor, but it's still not good enough.

I'm not saying inundate the player with options. This actually proves this doesn't work, because too often it gives the player too many options and not enough time to properly analyze them all. It puts importance on an enemy over the weapon used to kill the enemy.

I'm saying rebalance the tutorial to properly focus on what they're trying to teach users. Redesign the icons and dialog boxes that already exist to do better at their job. And, of course, give people the option to turn on more and less. On the hardest difficulty, those boxes are still there, which is infuriating. Why would you give an expert the same tips as a novice?!

What I'm saying, is that game developers need to look into utilizing HCI design in their games. Streamline and make better what they already have, and remove what's not needed.

On the hardest difficulty, those boxes are still there, which is infuriating. Why would you give an expert the same tips as a novice?!

If it requires a playthrough, it's a mistake. If it doesn't, don't forget that not everyone who picks the hardest difficulty has played the game before. I generally pick either the hardest or second-hardest difficulty when I play games, because I want them to be hard. That doesn't mean that I know how to play that game.

I still like the idea of a separate tutorial section - not unlike (for lack of a better term) a Danger Room/Holodeck thing, or just a bunch of unconnected sequences designed to teach you a particular thing, from weapon usage to leaping from vehicle to vehicle while towing a tractor then commandeering a helicopter to lift the tractor to the next island. Or, you know, something less sensible.

or just a bunch of unconnected sequences designed to teach you a particular thing

Best example of this I can think of is L.A. Noire. I think it was brilliant to make being a patrol cop the tutorial for being a detective, covering every major game mechanic. And, like all good tutorials, it gives you the option of skipping it, such as for your second playthrough.

I find that some games that are aimed at hardcore gamers don't even give good directions or intuitive controls to hardcore gamers. I've played most of the Battlefield series and I've been playing BF3 on and off since launch, and I'm still finding out about different function keys. I still have trouble using the different chat functions.

I believe that a game should teach a player through gameplay. Making each challenge more difficult as you advanced. Even controls can be so confusing, especially Just Cause 2. There's like 3 different control sets for you to remember, and the game doesn't really have any missions for you to understand the gameplay. Many game companies rely on the fact that the consumer is a gaming vet, who basically knows how a game is played. They alienate and potentially scare off newcomers to games because they are basing it off the fact you should know what to do already. I prefer games that help you understand the mechanics of gameplay, like the Legend of Zelda series. Each dungeon is based around the item you find in it; that way when the boss fight requires that item to defeat it, you are confident in knowing what the item does and how you should use it. A video game should be an amazing experience, not one of frustration and anger.

I would really like to know how your GF would take to playing Half Life 2. The dev commentary for that game explains a great deal about the hows and whys of their teaching players the game. I would love to see if that developer did it 'right', and where you see flaws in what they did since you have the dev's own words right there with the game play to compare it against.

I absolutely agree with you, and I sunk a ton of hours into JC2. The training and forced escort mission didn't teach you much at all in playing around with the wire mechanics. Heck, one of the most important skills, sling-shotting yourself with the parachute (for fast escapes), had to be learned on your own. JC2, though, is especially hard to teach in missions since there's so much freedom in figuring out how to blow up or kill X, unlike most FPSes where it's WASD, jump, crouch, and take cover.

I must say that I was kinda expecting photos of your girlfriend. You make a lot of valid points, I think Just Cause is a 7/10 game, with possibilities of being a 9/10, IF only because of the clunky interface.

I wouldn't mind more games taking Deus Ex: HR's approach to tutorials. You're notified with a popup in the corner that a tutorial is available, and to hold tab to view a short film showing everything you need to know. If you don't care, you skip it, if you forget on you just return to that spot in the level and trigger it again. Very informative without being super invasive.